CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In two weeks, Brian Moynihan will take on what is sure to be the toughest job of his career: Running the nation’s biggest bank.

He’s got a lot on his plate. As chief executive of Bank of America, the former retail-banking chief at the Charlotte-based bank will have to cool relations with regulators, overcome skeptics in Congress, handle investigations into the bank’s purchase of Merrill Lynch, restore fractured morale and deal with cultural divides between the bank’s several centers of power.

So how does a 50-year-old, Ohio-born lawyer who came to the bank as part of its 2004 purchase of FleetBoston Financial do that? One word: execute.

In an interview Thursday, Moynihan discussed some of the challenges left for him and the bank and how he expects to go about resolving them in the upcoming year.

“When we use the word ‘execution,’ we mean key things that face our customers,” Moynihan said.

That includes rebuilding relationships with consumers who have had economic hardships, he said.

That’s a big job for Bank of America, which has about 53 million relationships with customers, including individual consumers and businesses. That breadth helps make BofA particularly vulnerable to high unemployment, which remains at double-digit levels.

That can mean more losses on BofA’s bread-and-butter business of making loans. BofA lost more than $2.2 billion in the third quarter as bad debt kept rising as consumers lost their jobs and struggled to pay their bills.

At the same time, Moynihan will have to juggle regulatory investigations into the bank’s 2008 acquisition of Merrill Lynch while trying to repair relationships with regulators and members of Congress, who sharply criticized his predecessor after the bank required billions in aid after acquiring Merrill.

More in Business

After the San Francisco Bay Area, metro Denver experienced the biggest apartment rent increases this decade in the country. But plenty of new supply should put future rent gains closer to the national average, according to a new report from RealPage, a real estate research firm.

Strong consumer spending, coupled with a booming stock market, the federal tax overhaul and a resurgent oil and gas industry are projected to grow the Colorado state general fund by as much as $1.3 billion next fiscal year.

Facebook plunged to its worst loss in four years Monday and led a rout in technology companies. The social media company's stock fell following reports that a data mining firm working for the Trump campaign improperly obtained data on 50 million Facebook users.